


Blood and Oil

by anna_bird



Category: Firefly
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-12
Updated: 2009-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:01:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anna_bird/pseuds/anna_bird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just another day for Serenity's doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood and Oil

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by sasha_feather and anatratrope. Written for the kink_bingo challenge, the prompt was "washing/cleaning each other."

Simon is in Serenity's infirmary and elbow deep in blood and sinew before nine o'clock Unified time, so he knows before he's rubbed the sleep out of his eyes that it's going to be a fantastic day. He keeps flashing back to his first day in East Hospital: the older residents had encouraged him to work the Sekmeta emergency ward. Drew (god, _Drew_, Simon hasn't thought of him in _ages_) in particular urged him on: "It's a challenge: see if you can handle the heaviest trauma load in the city." It was also the bloodiest. He'd thrown up once, cowering in a patient toilet like an intern, and then he'd wiped the vomit off his face without flinching at the sharp metallic smell or the red smears on his hands, and he went back out into Sekmeta and pulled a fourteen-hour first day.

 

He was a fool. And he hadn't even known how good he'd had it. At least then he'd had the luxury of proper instruments and an unending supply of disinfectant.

 

The infirmary stinks of blood, gunpowder and burnt ginger. Mal and Jayne had been at least twenty feet away when the rigged spice crate blew, and it had almost been too close. He's been picking pepperings of shrapnel out of Mal on a dwindling supply of pain dope, and trying not to think about River and her first solo flight as Serenity's pilot outrunning terrorist spicer thugs.

 

Mal makes a grumbling groggy noise and tries to sit up. Zoe puts one capable hand on his chest and pushes gently down, and Simon taps a hypodermic and passes it to her.

 

"Just ten cc's should do it. I don't want to run out with Jayne."

 

She nods. Zoe really should be a doctor, Simon thinks. Maybe she was one of sorts, during the Unification War; he has no idea. But her hands have always been steady, and after Wash - her hands are as stone solid as her face. She finds the vein with ease and depresses the plunger. After a few minutes, Mal slumps back against the table.

 

"Thank you." He extracts the last stray bits of metal and rearranges Mal's insides back to some order. It might not align with Mal's normal disposition but it's about what the Osirin Medical Alliance considers normal, or at least anatomically sound. Then they move onto Jayne, who appears to have taken on a Gatling hit squad in addition to the bomb, and is still on the painful side of conscious. Thank _Wo de tian ah_ Simon's on board with a bunch of stoics. It's the only way to conserve painkillers.

 

A few hours later his entire shirt is soaked through with red, but he's stabilized them. He can't keep his mind closed off. The pure straight focus he used to have - the way he could look down and a face wouldn't be a person, it would be his own face, nothing between his mind and skills and the patient, like he was digging around in his own insides or palpitating his own stuttering heart. No wonder he'd been renowned for a gentle touch. But he can't achieve that distance anymore. He can't, for example, smooth his own face over Mal's. He looks down and sees only his captain. So he has to look away, into the guts, because those could more easily be his own, anyone's, strictly anonymous viscera and veins.

 

Perhaps it's because finally, after two years of running around and worrying himself crazy over River and feeling like a leech in more ways than one, he's on an even footing with these people, and he wants to fix them more than he secretly wants to leave them.

 

Well, Mal, anyway.

 

He straps them down and radios River, who's been holding the helm steady and under the radar of the third moon for god knows how long after they split from Beylix. She really is better. Sometimes he has to remind himself it's not just his own wishful thinking with gruesome examples, like otherwise they'd be dead, drawn into a sun or a gravity well while she played with Wash's dinosaurs.

 

"Don't know what possessed him an' Jayne to go off without Harden an' the other traders," Zoe says, stripping off her mask. She touches Mal's forehead with her gloved hand and leaves a rusty streak of spent blood. "But it won't happen again."

 

She looks him up and down. "You best go clean up. I'll fasten up things round here."

 

She doesn't need to say it twice. He goes back to the quarters he shares with Kaylee and tries to get down the ladder without leaving too much gore on the rungs.

 

He pulls out the sink and scrapes off the worst of the blood and bits. Then he fills it, which is a time-consuming task since the water ekes out at a pace slower than a trickle. He rubs his skin too hard and can't tell if he's stained pink. Then he drains the water and fills the basin again. The water is icy cold. He better tell Kaylee, it might be an issue, something not working right and potentially deadly.

 

"Simon?" Kaylee's home, and down the ladder in her customary lightning fashion. She comes up close behind, and he can feel the heat of her before she wraps her arms around his waist. Just like that: he's forgotten what he was going to say to her.

 

"How's she doing?"

 

"Good as she's gonna get for now, poor baby." She reaches past him and strokes the wall with a very grimy hand. "Though everything's so bypassed and crossed, ain't no way she'll last until Persephone. Talked to Zoe and she says we'll put down sooner."

 

"Where?"

 

"She ain't said yet. She's looking at charts with River." Kaylee's other hand strokes up and down his chest, like she's trying to soothe both him and the ship. "But she did tell me to come down here and get rested up. So."

 

He pulls her hand away from the ship, and after a beat, dips it into the sink.

 

"Ha," Kaylee says. She's put on her embarrassed voice. "Not much use in that."

 

"Why not?" He rubs her knuckles with his thumb and feels the barest suggestion of a shiver go through her. "I've already cleaned up myself." He looks down at his white shirt, dead last in the line of the ones he bought on Ariel so long ago, now stained beyond repair. "Well, mostly." He rummages through the little alcove above the basin until he finds the scrubbing brush Kaylee uses, and scrapes it over her palm.

 

"Um."

 

"Yes?" The oil is like henna in her skin, creasing and spidering just out of reach of cleansing. He can't look away from it - it's as though she's created a million more lifelines with one day swinging her wrench.

 

"Um."

 

He turns to face her. He's never known her to blush, he doesn't think she has ever known how herself. She isn't blushing now.

 

"It's just. I don't think it'd come out. I don't think - I don't _clean up_, you know?"

 

She's embarrassed still, and waffling on the edge of angry now - somehow Simon can't ever seem to stop underlining their differences, the fact that he grew up on Osiris with the door wide open, hell, without doors or windows or walls to bar his way from anything he wanted; and Kaylee in comparison grew up underground, on the Rim, learning to love machines for the sake of it.

 

She also has a beguiling smear of grit just below her collarbone. He dips his hands into the basin. The spout sputters and trickles. Kaylee's still talking.

 

"I mean, maybe if you took some sandpaper to it - ha ha ha, not that I'm a fan of pain though I will try anything once, it's just not my cup, _dong le ma_ \- maybe - maybe - "

 

Simon wipes at the grit and water spreads down her skin. It doesn't do much for the grit, but the effect is most interesting on the rest of her: she's warmer than ever, her heart rate's up and her nipples have pricked up against her shirt. He grins sheepishly to himself. _Wake up, doctor, it's past time to punch out._ He scoops up a handful of water and presses it against her chest, and she gasps and arches against him.

 

" 'S chilly."

 

He clutches her close, gets his hands under her and sets her bodily on the edge of the basin. He's straining against his trousers like a _bao_ schoolboy, so gorram hard so fast, and he can't catalogue his reactions. And then he realizes that he hasn't done such a fine job of cleaning himself; he's leaving pinkish smears against her chest and shirt. Kaylee smirks at him, her eyes heavy with that look that always gives him pause: like he's chocolate or at least covered in strawberry sauce instead of watery blood. Then she dips her hands into the water.

 

"If I'm gonna get a wet ass, you may as well too."

 

He hadn't noticed; what an imbecile. But Kaylee, as usual, doesn't appear to care. She pours water over his chest -

 

"Cold!" he exclaims, and it's amazingly good, invigorating - and she's running her small, strong hands over his arms and wrists and, gorram, over herself. She's pressing a dripping palm between her legs and Simon hurries to join her, to coax out those little groans and sighs he likes so well.

 

"Mmm." She licks his neck. "Smells like ginger."

 

He starts at that. But she wraps her slick wet hands around his neck and her hot legs around his waist and she grinds against him like he's a wish fulfilled, like he's the skiff her parents could never give her - _oh my god, shut UP_, he tells his brain - and it's lucky that Kaylee's already inching her hand down his trousers - a man's got to have some distraction from the weird _gou shi_ that pops out of nowhere.

 

"C'mon now," Kaylee says, drawing him out of his drawers. "Help me get these things off."

 

He thinks he may have ripped her pants, and he'll be sorry (and on hand with a needle) later, but Kaylee has her hands on him, she guides him into her, and she's so wet and hot and she's moaning into his mouth with every thrust and Simon can't be gentle. His legs shake as he gets closer to losing it. He's almost forgotten that he's been standing for the past five hours. Kaylee must feel it, because she launches herself into him and rides him down to the floor and screws him into Serenity until they're both marked with little abrasions from the floor, and he laughs as he comes, because gorram if that isn't just her.

 

Somewhere in the middle of things the basin overturned, and they're lying in a frigid puddle until Kaylee struggles off of him with a groan, strips them both out of their remaining clothes, and hustles him into bed with her.

 

Simon doesn't know what to say in the afterglow, and not just when his backside's been rubbed raw. Usually he doesn't say anything so as not to ruin things. But he's just so simultaneously full and empty, with Kaylee warm and soft and wrapped around him, with the silent slumbering bodies in the infirmary, with Zoe's cold eyes and River piloting alone up on the bridge. He thinks he's never felt so divided, so divorced from himself in his life, not even when he exiled himself from home.

 

He touches Kaylee's hair tentatively, and she reaches up and winds her hand in his. Even after all that water and - er - rubbing, her palms still have a faint crumbly texture about them. He must smell rank; the stains on his arms must remind her that Mal is hurt, Mal might die. But she'd never say anything.

 

He tightens his hand on hers, and pulls her closer. Why does he get this? No, he shouldn't think like that.

 

"Neither of us clean up well, I guess," she says. "But we don't have to yet." She rolls on top of him and smiles, sweet as Sihnon sugar rice. "Best make more of a mess first."

 

The End


End file.
